Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2006

The $10 Billion Effort to Rebuild Afghanistan

Things are bad in Iraq, but how goes it in Afghanistan? A joint report by the Defense Department and the State Department found that the U.S.-trained police force in Afghanistan is not capable of carrying out routine law enforcement work. Managers of the $1.1 billion training program, the report concluded, can't keep track of how many officers are on duty, let alone what happened to all the equipment that has gone missing. Another report on contractors, by a California-based watchdog group, detailed such grim outcomes as new schools so shoddy they had to be rebuilt after a winter's worth of snow and a highway that started crumbling before it was finished.